Automated filters weed out the obvious junk, but a person still makes the call on each site. Let’s look at the final manual donor check: what to open in Ahrefs, which signals mean rejection, and which are only grounds for negotiating the price down. This guide is useful for anyone buying links in bulk who wants to spend their budget on live sites, not pretty numbers in a report.
Where manual checks fit in the selection process
Selection is done in stages, with Ahrefs coming in at the penultimate one. First, a pool of sites is assembled, then run through Checktrust—the service handles trustworthiness and overall profile spam, including the ratio of incoming to outgoing links. Everything that makes it through the automated filter is reviewed manually. The finalists are then opened on the marketplace, where their listings and site appearance are assessed; before the purchase, the donor and recipient are checked for topical relevance.
Two terms you’ll need to understand what follows: donor — the site the link is bought from, recipient — the page it points to.
The funnel is narrow. Link buyers report cases where just four sites out of the first thousand domains checked make it to purchase. Keep this order of magnitude in mind when planning the workload: checking a thousand domains won’t get you a thousand links.
Traffic graphs: measure the drop as a percentage, not in thousands
Start by opening the organic traffic graph. A sharp drop or traffic falling to zero means an immediate rejection. A gradual decline is not a reason to reject a site.
Absolute thresholds like “reject anything that lost a thousand visits” don’t work, because a thousand means different things for different sites. You need to calculate the loss as a share of the previous volume.
| Visits before | Loss | What it means | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 000 | 1 000 | Lost one-fifth; the site is still active | Accept |
| 1 100 | 1 000 | Only a hundred left; traffic has collapsed | Reject |
Losing one-fifth of traffic over a month or two is within acceptable limits. The reasoning is simple: you’re not buying a donor forever. If the graph suggests the site will remain in its current state for at least another six months, the link will have time to pay for itself. A site with no traffic at all has no such value, and there’s no point paying the old rate for it.
How far back you can look depends on your plan. Ahrefs’ Standard plan provides 24 months of data—enough to see the overall two-year picture and examine the last three to six months in detail. Lower-tier plans offer a shorter history, so some signs of a site’s gradual decline will remain out of view.
News sites throw off the usual assessment
News sites produce a sawtooth pattern instead of a smooth line, and by the usual rules such a graph looks unstable. The spikes are caused by event-related articles: a film comes out, a match takes place, or a newsworthy event happens; the article draws a one-off burst of traffic, the event fades from the news cycle, and traffic returns to its previous level.
Assess these sites by the graph’s baseline, not its peaks. A site where an individual article once brought in up to 14 thousand visits, but the baseline sits at 400–500, is worth exactly its 400–500. Steady traffic comes from evergreen pages that aren’t tailored to a specific event, and that’s the traffic your link will benefit from.
Backlink profile: where normal ends
Don’t confuse the number of backlinks with the number of referring domains. A single site can provide several links, so 133 thousand backlinks from three thousand unique domains looks normal. Focus on unique domains—that line shows the profile’s true breadth.
A vertical spike in the referring domains graph indicates a link blast: if the site gained around 500 domains in a month, it was boosted automatically. Mass link placement is done using XRumer or GSA Search Engine Ranker—both tools scatter thousands of links across spam sites.
A link blast alone isn’t grounds for rejection, for the following reasons:
- competitors may have blasted the site, with the owner having nothing to do with it;
- the owner may have deliberately done a blast to boost the site’s DR for their own purposes.
What matters isn’t the fact that there was a link blast, but the anchors it brought in.
Anchors are the only hard stop
Spammy anchors on a site mean rejection. These include betting, casinos, adult content, and mentions of prohibited substances. The easiest way to find them is to filter by a list of words: porn, casino, as well as brands—1xbet, 1win, Melbet, Vavada, Pinup.
Don’t rely on a single filter. New casino brands appear all the time, and the latest names won’t be in your word list simply because you don’t know about them. So also scan the anchor list manually—that’s how you find things that weren’t included in the query template.
A clear example of a rejection: a news site in Krasnodar passed the traffic check, and its graph behaved as expected for a media outlet, but its anchors contained a full set of betting brands. The “Backlinks” section revealed the source: the site had been drawn into someone else’s spam operation and used as a link in a network of casino sites. It’s not worth buying, regardless of the other metrics.
The second type of rejection looks less serious, but means the same thing. A construction portal with anchors about jokes and funny pictures had been blasted automatically across irrelevant sites. Anchors unrelated to the site’s topic are just as much a sign of manipulation as direct betting ads.
The mistake that makes the whole analysis worthless
Ahrefs can show data for the entire domain or for subdomains separately, and the mode resets on its own. If you forget to switch it, you’ll get a picture compiled from subdomains that your link won’t be associated with.
The difference can be significant. On one site, the domain showed 415 visits and a gradual decline, while the same project looked like it was growing when subdomains were included. If you buy based on the second picture, you’re paying for subdomain traffic while placing your link on a declining domain. Check the selected mode for every site, not just once per session.
There’s no need to exclude third-level domains from your selection—they can work as donors if they meet the other criteria.
Why the criteria are deliberately limited
The checklist looks short, and that’s by design. Each additional parameter rules out part of the pool, and you could end up with no donors left to buy. It’s more practical to choose sites that get a solid passing grade than to hunt for an ideal site that doesn’t exist on the market.
One parameter you can ignore is whether sites share IP subnets. Fifty domains on one subnet is common for hosting and doesn’t mean anything. Two hundred domains on one subnet starts to look like a network set up to boost link metrics. But even these sites can be usable if they have live traffic, so many link buyers simply don’t check this metric.
The site’s appearance isn’t assessed at this stage either. Visual evaluation is left until you open the listing on the marketplace, where you can view the whole site and see what the pages look like and where exactly the link will go.
Price as a way to manage risk
A questionable donor doesn’t necessarily have to be excluded—sometimes all you need to do is reconsider the price. A site with obvious signs of being boosted, but with traffic and live keywords, will likely fall to a hundred visits in the foreseeable future. Practitioners estimate that it makes sense to buy such a site for no more than one and a half thousand rubles: at that price, the link will have time to pay for itself before the project loses its traffic altogether, while paying more won’t be worth it.
This approach separates two different decisions: “the site is harmful” and “the site won’t last.” The first means reject it; the second means negotiate.
The selection spreadsheet and moving on to the marketplace
It’s useful to track check results in a spreadsheet with a color key: green for sites that pass, red for those rejected. Add a comments column next to each site address and note the reason for rejection: “casino and porn anchors,” “irrelevant anchors, potentially low traffic.” A month later, you won’t remember why you rejected a particular domain, but the spreadsheet will show you right away—and you won’t have to check it again.
Ahrefs isn’t the only place to start. For small batches, a marketplace catalog is faster and doesn’t use up your analytics service limits. When searching by domain, remove the slash from the address or the site won’t show up. When you have a lot of domains, enter them as a list to get all available donors at once, along with exported contact details—then just go from the spreadsheet straight to each site’s listing.
The marketplace also shows where else a particular donor is being sold. The data may be out of date: a site may appear as available on only one marketplace even though it’s already been added to another. It’s worth checking manually if the price differs significantly across marketplaces.
Steps for checking a single donor
- Open the site in Ahrefs and make sure domain mode is selected, not subdomains.
- Check the traffic graph for the past two years, then look separately at the last three to six months.
- Assess the drop as a share of the previous volume; for news sites, focus on the graph’s baseline.
- Check the referring domains graph for vertical spikes—they’re signs of link blasts.
- Filter the anchors by spam words and brands, then scan the entire list.
- If you find suspicious anchors, open the backlinks section and check where they’re coming from.
- Record your decision and a comment in the spreadsheet; flag any borderline site and consider a lower price.
- Open the finalists that passed in their marketplace listings and assess their appearance, then check the donor and recipient for topical relevance.
The main goal of selection can be summed up in one sentence: you need live sites with traffic that will last long enough. Everything else—trust metrics, clean subnets, a good-looking backlink profile—is secondary to that.
